novelty training
London
Articles, research and tools for the L&D professional. Insights for managing the
business of learning.Talent development — especially in these stressful and
emotional times — needs to adapt to meet the humanness of leadership. The
decades-old go-to of routine, process and familiarity lacks one of the most
compelling and relatable aspects of the human experience: weirdness. The reason
our talent development industry tries to keep training as non-weird as possible
is because strangeness can initially feel uncomfortable, disorganized and just
plain awkward. We often see thrusting participants into their discomfort zone
too quickly as risky. In psychological and neuroscience research, weirdness is
also referred to as “novelty,” or something new and different. Interestingly,
the current understanding of memory is that when we experience something novel
in a familiar context, we can more easily store that event in our memory. A
novel stimulus activates our memory center (the hippocampus) more than a
familiar stimulus does. Even better, the emotional processing in our amygdala
also impacts this memory formation, particularly if there is a strong emotion
about that novelty. In fact, our brains process a lot of sensory information
every day. The hippocampus compares incoming sensory information with stored
knowledge. If the two differ, it sends a pulse of dopamine to the substantia
nigra (SN) and ventral tegmental area (VTA) in the midbrain. From there, nerve
fibers extend back to the hippocampus and trigger the release of more dopamine.
This process is called the hippocampal-SN/VTA loop. The dopamine release in a
“weird” experience also makes us more motivated to discover, process and store
these sensory impressions for a longer period of time.
